Acts 5:17-26
Listen to or watch this sermon here.
One day last year our daughter went to school late, so my wife checked her in at the office and walked her down the hall to the kindergarten classroom. It was then that something unexpected happened. As she entered the class all the children began to chant my daughter’s name with great enthusiasm: Gloria, Gloria, Gloria! As she took her seat, a wry smile spread over her face as her classmates pounded their desks and cheered. The teacher, of course, tried to quiet them with limited success.
Later that day, my wife asked my daughter what all the hoopla at drop off was about. “Whenever a kid is late, we chant and cheer because we’re supposed to be in school.” In other words, for these kids, lateness was a form of liberation, so a latecomer was routinely heralded as a champion upon arrival. Within a matter of months this group of five-year-olds had organized themselves into gang of anti-establishment disruptors. Facing the tyrannical powers of the mighty kindergarten teacher, they had already developed methods of resistance. It was as though someone had been playing them protest songs in place of lullabies, and by the end of the year thought they’d be rapping the lyrics to Public Enemy‘s “Fight the Power”.
On the one hand my wife and I felt for my daughter’s teacher, because we can only imagine how challenging a kindergarten class must be to run. On the other hand, we found the whole episode hilarious. We find it less funny when our girls organize themselves into a mini-resistance force against us.
Subverting the powers
There are a few rules in comedy and one of them is subversion. A story is meant to go one way, but then turns in another direction, and along with the delight of surprise sometimes comes a laugh. In a way that’s the very essence comedy itself, the subversion of what’s serious, regular or predictable. Take Bugs Bunny, for example. The hunter is meant to catch the rabbit but is time and again absurdly evaded. The well-equipped hunter becomes a fool, and the supposedly harmless, adorable bunny becomes a clever, even dangerous adversary. Poking holes in the power claims of the high and mighty, subversion is amusing but also practical. Also deployed when the stakes are higher, subversion is often used in resistance movements to combat oppressive regimes. The more worked up the powerful get, sweating to assert their control, the more amusing subversion becomes. And, inevitably, the more the powerful try to assert control, the more the perceptions around their power drains and the sillier they look. From cartoons to complex allegories to late night television, subversion is as present now as it was in the ancient world.
If you found the reading from Acts today even a little amusing, that’s because a form of subversion is at play in the narrative. Based on the jealously and power claims of Israel’s high council, the apostles are arrested and thrown in prison. The men are then surprisingly sprung from prison by another sort of power and return right back to the scene of the crime, only for the high council to be left scratching their heads at the empty jail and ordering yet another arrest. The scene plays like a foolish game of cat and mouse. The cat will never catch the mouse, because there is another sort of power at work behind the mouse than the cat is willing to acknowledge. As their henchmen huff and puff around the city, what becomes increasingly clear in the narrative is that whatever power the high council thought they had, they don’t. Their bullying tactics and threats aren’t working, while the Jesus movement only continues to grow. Their corrupt power has been exposed for what it is, and now a true power is running rampant in the city – the authority of the resurrected Jesus and the power of his Spirit.
If we pay close attention we’ll notice a subtle shift from Acts 4 to Acts 5. When Peter and John are first arrested and interrogated by the high council in Acts 4, the reader might still be biting their fingernails, worried for their fate. But once they are released, and God’s power continues to bubble up in the city through signs and wonders, the corrupt power of the high council rapidly and publicly drains. The apostles are not cowed or controlled. Toward the end of the passage, even after the apostles are severely punished by physical torture, they emerge joyful. The strange power at work in their lives is stronger than whatever the authorities can throw at them.
What stands behind all this of course, is not the cleverness of the believers, nor their courage or will to resist, but God’s genuine authority and power over against pagan Roman might and the corrupted power of Israel’s high council. This is what’s being spelled out in the scene we just read. Look how silly the corrupt human powers are against the genuine power of the crucified and resurrected Messiah, the Lord Jesus. When will the powers get the picture and realize they’re fighting with the wind, the very breath of God? We’ll hear more on that next week as the scene expands and Kirsten concludes the episode.
Our task today is to ask what we can lift from this almost comedic scene. I’d like to do so in light of our emphasis on Global Work both last week and today. To that end, let’s return to central plot twist of this passage. It’s a good example of a repeated pattern in Acts and carries a few insights for us as a community who sends folks to share the gospel, as well as sent people ourselves, since sharing is natural for any believing community.
But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail and brought them out. 20 “Go, stand in the temple courts,” he said, “and tell the people all about this new life.”
21 At daybreak they entered the temple courts, as they had been told, and began to teach the people.
Let’s highlight three phrases from the passage. First, “the Lord opened the doors”; second, “tell all the people about this new life”, and third, “at daybreak they entered the temple.”
“the Lord opened the doors”
Very often the first request from a missionary is not for funding or material support, but for prayer. That’s because the folks who do this sort of work, a work which takes significant trust and sacrifice, truly believe they’re incapable of advancing the mission by their own power, but are following the action and direction of the Lord. They trust God is actually working ahead of them even in the details, because it’s his kingdom and their work is first his mission. On the ground floor of their trust in God, they are acting as though it is not, in fact, their job to fight the powers. That has been done by a power beyond them.
This scene in Acts reminds us again, that for all the action the first believing community was taking, God was working above, beyond and ahead. So, the apostles don’t get themselves out of prison in a sort of Hollywood jail break plot. Nor do they start a riot and overrun the guards. The apostles don’t open the doors to the prison; the Lord opens the doors by sending a kind of special agent. It doesn’t seem the apostles had any idea that would happen, and we’re not even told they were praying to be released. They may have been as shocked any anyone else.
Part of our commitment to the mission, the sharing of the gospel, is trusting that God opens doors. If his kingdom is to spread, it will be by his methods and under his power, which can at times seem ordinary and at others extraordinary. Personally, I’ve not met a missionary worth their salt who lacks stories of God opening all kinds of doors which only God could. Believers needn’t crowbar our way in or out of people’s lives, nor do believers need to take the subversion of power into their own hands, like a rabble of resistant kindergarteners. Acts reminds us that God will subvert whatever power he needs to, in his own way and in his own time. The cross is the clearest picture of that, standing as a symbol of the ultimate subversion of corrupt power.
Out of places, into places, into lives, God opens doors, and with trust and obedience believers walk through. What if we took that image of God opening locked doors and applied it to the places we’re in and people we’re among today? What’s that prayer? Maybe it’s something like, “Lord, I will not force or coerce my way through this relationship, even if my intentions are good. Lord, you’ll have to open the doors, and I will walk through in obedient boldness once you have.” That’s a prayer that owns our role but is also crystal clear on the only power able to truly transform.
“tell the people all about this new life”
There is a commitment from many missionaries to exemplify and embody the message of Jesus, the message of new life. This is the case with many of the global workers we support through our church. Agricultural projects, care homes for children, clean water projects to name a few. But at the core of all this work are two truths. First, the belief that the message is for all people, which is why the gospel has expanded globally and why the work is so contextualized and creative. And the second is the centrality of the message itself.
Global work is not merely aid or educational work, but work which carries the message of life which came through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Global work is getting the message of life out there, however possible. Much of what we label missionary work is only a by-product of message itself. Christians have become so proficient at translating the gospel into the material, however, that many of our 21st century neighbours take for granted the roots of the fruit. Believers will argue, of course, that there is no fruit without the root, that the message is not simply an add on to the mission, the message is the mission itself. Motivation for all global work is ultimately the genuine belief that the gospel is a message of life for all people, not just help for all people. Without a focus on that message, the delivery systems lose their purpose. Global work is about sharing the gospel – with words, with actions, but all rooted in sharing the message of life. That is very clear in Acts right from the start. God opens the doors, so the message of life might be shared with all people.
“At daybreak they entered the temple courts”
You could be forgiven if you struggled to understand the apostles interest to return to the scene of their arrest. Because of their teaching they’d been arrested and then had been sprung from prison. But rather than skipping town, they go straight back to the temple courts at first light to begin teaching all over again. They did so because of the angelic secret agent’s instruction, but also because of the boldness of the Holy Spirit we’ve been hearing about earlier in Acts. We defined that boldness some time back as “fearless confidence in the presence of high rank.” So, in this instance, the apostles appear outrightly defiant against the authorities because they’re living under a greater authority. They go where God sends them, and if they go where he sends them, come what may, they go under his authority and in his power, which puts all other power in the shade.
This sort of trust and boldness has translated to many missionaries making all kinds of odd, sometimes risky choices. I have friends who are currently in the very early stages of planting a church in one of the most un-Christian and even hostile neighbourhoods to the gospel in all of Canada. They are going to where and to whom they believe they have been sent.
I’m also reminded of one of my grandparents, my Nana, a reminder to me that God is no respecter of age or stage. We can go where he sends us. In her sixties, my Nana followed the Lord’s direction to serve as a missionary in South Sudan. She’d fly into dangerous and isolated regions to share the gospel with women and children and help other believers. She did this because she trusted that God opens doors, even the doors of a cargo plane on a dusty runway. A senior citizen flying into war torn areas, teaching in mud huts, clamouring into the occasional fox hole might seem strange to many of us sitting here today, but she did so because of her trust in God’s authority and the message she carried. A message of life which she felt everyone deserved to hear, especially children, and so entered spaces she seemingly had no business entering. When my Nana died, our family received a good deal correspondence from those whose lives she had touched, and it was moving to hear that those roots of faith had been watered by her example. My Nana lived almost an entire life, never working as a missionary before, but when the time came she went where she was sent with confidence.
Whether we 16 or 60, we walk through doors God opens, with the message of life, in Jesus’ authority, and the steam of the Holy Spirit. Be that South Sudan, be that a locker room, a classroom, our workplaces, through the front doors of our neighbours, into a care home, a hospital or a prison. There are no locked doors for the Lord, he carries every key. So don’t be surprised when a door opens and be ready to walk through with the assurance that you carry the message of life too.
Luke Knight 